


sapphics and lizards kissed by Julian Bashir

by Damned_Writers



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/F, Gen, Julian is happy for everyone, Kira Nerys is just with so many women and other gendered people, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, everyone is happy for Julian, everyone's in a better place than they were end s7, friendships, futuristic discussions of aromanticism, gender? very confusing, just drowning in the love, very gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:07:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22992937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damned_Writers/pseuds/Damned_Writers
Summary: In which Julian realises that every woman he's ever kissed is wlw and he's very happy for them, but also wondering what his taste in women means. Discussions about what love means, how great it is that space is so darn queer, living beyond normative concepts, invitations to weddings, and more.
Relationships: Ezri Dax/Leeta (Leeta mentioned), Julian Bashir/Elim Garak/Kelas Parmak, Kira Nerys/Keiko O'Brien (Keiko mentioned), Kira Nerys/Ro Laren (Ro Laren mentioned), Kira Nerys/various ocs (ocs mentioned), Sarina Douglas/various ofc (ofcs mentioned)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 36





	1. Kira Nerys

It was with surprise and delight that Kira Nerys met Julian Bashir on Deep Space Nine again years after they had both left it. They decided to go have a drink at Quark’s (the only truly familiar place left) and reminisced for a long time about the old days, the good, the bad, and the strange…

“- I _remember,_ and Lwaxana didn’t want to admit that she’d been causing all of us to start throwing ourselves at each other,” she laughed.

“Didn’t we-” asked Julian-

“Kiss. Yes, we did. It was…”

“… pretty awful, I think,” finished Julian. “No need to sugar-coat it, we were both so addled, I’m amazed we ever located each other’s mouths.”

She laughed again. “Yeah, it was.”

“Speaking of romance, how is that going these days?” He sipped his Raktajino.

“Uh yeah, these days, still in that open relationship with Keiko-”

He spat out his drink. “What! _O'Brien? Keiko O'Brien???”_

“Yeah? Thought you knew, after I carried her baby, we got… close. Didn’t Chief ever tell you?”

Julian squinted as he tried to remember. “… _maybe?_ We might’ve been drunk at the time… maybe he just assumed I knew? And now, of course, we don’t see each other a lot, him being a professor and my… everything that's going on.”

She sighed heavily. “I know what you mean. Keiko and I don’t see each other often either. These days I’m with Laren a lot more and the polycule on Cardassia when I can get an assignment there-”

Julian frowned deeper. “ _Ro_ Laren?”

“Yeah. We were working together here after the Dominion War and things just… happened.”

“You and - hold on, did you say polycule?”

She coughed, awkwardly. “As ambassador for Bajoran and Cardassian relations, I came into contact with… some of Garak’s interesting friends. Politicians, activists… things just… happened.” She shrugged, like that would clarify anything. “He never told you?”

“No, he - _Cardassians?”_

“ _You’re_ with Garak _and_ Parmak!” she half-yelled in defence. For a moment the bar quieted down. She waved to Quark in acknowledgement that they weren’t about to get into a fist-fight. Just some friendly yelling.

Julian lowered his voice slightly. “That’s. True. Yes.” He shook his head. “Wow.”

She nodded.

“Well, when you next come and visit, you should invite them over. I’m sure Elim and Kelas won’t mind, once I’ve finished strangling them for never telling me anything.”

Kira frowned slightly. “Now that you say that I think there might be a feud there. When I say Garak’s ‘friends,’ I might mean enemies, I never can remember which with him.”

“In that case, definitely invite them along and I won’t warn him in advance.”

“A fitting revenge,” smirked Kira, before they once more launched into the tale of hers and Keiko’s strange pregnancy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote another fic called the language of change in which I basically set up a pre-relationship scenario for Kira while she's an ambassador for Bajoran and Cardassian relations. I'm kinda running with that here, but you don't have to read it to understand. (Also she and Garak are friends, she's not judging Bashir)


	2. Sarina Douglas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Partially an exploration of how I read Sarina and her relationship to Julian and her general journey in understanding herself + gently nudging themes of future aromanticism/queerness/gender identity and how one engages with concepts like “falling in love” when it’s got so many limiting connotations to it.

Sarina was still a naturally taciturn person. Once the novelty of her ability to process information in a way that didn’t immediately overwhelm her senses had worn off, she had discovered that she still required a lot of stillness and hyper-specific input to feel calm. The amount of information at a space station or a busy market could turn her inwards again and even if there was no overloading stream of sensory stimulation she would still return to entirely non-verbal states for stretches of time simply because she found she preferred it that way.

Julian, by contrast, was an ever-bouncing ball of restless energy, not unlike Jack. Sarina often wondered if those two really understood how similar they were, the former simply more used to masking the constant need for stimulus and output, the latter never having to force himself to learn. Neither was ideal. Julian twisted himself into knots to fit in, while Jack would never be allowed to try. Sarina was lucky, she guessed. Stillness wasn’t considered intrusive in the same way, provided she was in the right company. It didn’t garner her many friends, but she found she didn’t mind that either. The way she related to people had always been complex, even before the augmentations.

In the hours she sat with Julian this evening, she went over her life in forensic detail, as she often did. She saw herself as a young girl who had wished for quiet and fixated on details that nobody else found interesting, finding the silkiness of another girl’s hair so wonderful that she couldn’t stop herself from touching it. The two of them playing together resulting in Sarina brushing it over and over again, hypnotised. She couldn’t remember the girl beyond those moments, no matter how hard she tried. Like for Julian and the others, there was a strange border between before-and-after the augmentations. The sudden change in the way they were forced to engage with the world rendered their past selves a mirage. Always seeming just out of reach. Still, the girl was real. The emotions experienced with the girl were real.

She liked Julian’s company a great deal. His companionship came without hidden meanings. He never expected anything from her, now that he had come to terms with his own loneliness and the misguided attempts he had made in his youth to compensate for it. He had been through too much, she thought, but at least he understood that he didn’t have to be alone any more. On that matter…

“I have discovered something about myself,” she said out loud.

Julian, who for some time had been thoroughly engrossed in muttering to himself over a new scientific theory that he would no doubt share with her once he had solved it, went to sit with her immediately. The force of his attention really was something else. No wonder she had been confused about her own reactions to him when he had first helped her. And no wonder he had been confused in turn. The majority of humanity really did still push a far-too fixed set of prescriptions of what relationships and closeness and intimacy meant and those who couldn’t fit within those boxes were left scrambling to understand how to relate to others. 

“Sarina?” he prompted gently.

Oh. She had returned to her mind again. With anyone else she might have been embarrassed, but with Julian she knew he merely meant to remind her that she had something she wanted to say to him. She put her hand in his to indicate that all was well. His skin was nice to touch. “I am in love,” she said. “I have been spending time quantifying my emotions in way I can describe and have come to the conclusion that current simple words are insufficient in any language… Except for perhaps some of the twistier dialects of Kardasi,” she added. He laughed. “So I turned to poetry. The layers of existence in poetry of any language made me understand that there was no need to quantify when you could simply let the emotion be.”

“I had much the same instinct whenever I found myself attracted to someone,” he said. “It wasn’t until Elim that I suddenly found that the ability to understand the emotion was less important than just… _feeling_ the emotion itself.”

She nodded. “That makes sense. But it’s not… I don’t feel attraction like it’s apparently expected.” She frowned. It felt like anything she said would be slightly off-axis from what she meant. The limitations of language were making her skin itch. “And I don’t mean that I don’t love you,” she said. She shook her head in frustration, feeling herself shutting down. “Stupid-” she began.

“No,” he said, quickly. “I know what you mean. You’re in a… place… with someone or multiple someones. Emotionally. That you haven’t experienced before, going by the modulation of your voice. And for lack of a better word in our current understanding, but trying to describe it in easy terms, we call it being in love… I understand…” and he really did, she knew that. It calmed her down.

“Do you sometimes wish it was easier?”

“Once you’ve opened yourself up beyond the expected scope of emotional interaction, everything becomes both a lot more complicated, but so much more freeing. As a scientist I’ve found it quite exhilarating, after I got past the point of caring about other peoples opinions and learnt maybe a handful of tricks to try not to offend others _quite_ so often, so… who is it?” he finished, smiling softly.

“… It’s happened multiple times,” she felt like she was confessing something clandestine. She often felt this way with Julian, like they bypassed normal conventions and moved in spaces that were off limits outside of their secret conversations. Of course, this time what she was about to say _was_ partially a government secret, but she didn’t care.

He would always be the first person she’d felt this with, even now when people whom she could feel safe with were becoming more, and following her own rules of logic, this meant that she didn’t want to keep secrets from him. Besides, Julian might tell Garak, but Garak would make sure it never went further than that. “I’ve been involved with classified projects that have put me in touch with people who for various reasons might have felt like we do. AI, Borg, other Augments, and so on. It turns out I am invaluable to the process of integration, because we’ve been on similar journeys. Discovering concepts that seem to come easily to some: Gender, love, norms of interactions, etcetera. You know.”

Julian nodded. He had always had a tenuous grasp of what any of these things meant or even why they mattered. The more he had interacted beyond the scope of human experience, the more he had come to the conclusion that they didn’t, really. Which meant he could make them matter to himself exactly as much as he wanted them to.

Like he had said to her: Complicated, but freeing.

She continued: “And in that project, the connections I’ve made – we’ve made with one another – I’ve never felt so… complete. What I am is not just enough, what I am is good.” She touched Julian’s face. “You’ve always made me feel that way. But for some reason the emotion I’ve felt with people who’re women – who’ve _chosen_ to be women – it’s a different emotion somehow. Maybe because I also made the choice to be a woman or… maybe I was always this way. It’ll require more research. What I wanted to tell you is that I’ve used you as a template for falling in love.”

He grinned widely at that. “I’m honoured.”

Sarina returned it. Smiling was still a strange thing as well. It often came to her less naturally than to people raised with the idea of it. Right now however, she found that it was done without any thought, simply as a response to them being perfectly in tune. “Knew you would be.”

“Maybe one day I’ll get to meet them, if the project ever moves out of classified.”

“I hope so.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So as I was tagging for relationships I saw Sarina/Seven of Nine and now I'm like... maybe that's one of the people Sarina is talking about here? I haven't reached Seven of Nine on Voyager yet, but once I do, I might feel like elaborating some more on that concept...


	3. Ezri Dax

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ezri has some big news to share

Ezri hadn't spoken with Julian in a few years. Not since their somewhat awkward breakup turning into an even more awkward conversation about Julian running away to Cardassia and then a series of aborted attempts to schedule a meeting at some point in their busy lives had petered into a letter or a third-hand account of what he was up to. Apparently now he and Garak were making house with a third Cardassian.

She bumped into Kira occasionally, who had mentioned this other doctor before clapping her hands in front of her mouth and refusing to say more, but for a long time Ezri couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't quite real, as though she had dreamed all of her life after getting joined. Then she had begun her own journey of self-discovery and strangely not seeing Julian at all had made her understand him all the better. The two of them hadn't known who they were, muddled by her confusing memories of past lives, his grief over losing Jadzia, not dying over and over again, and their mutual attraction. After all this time she just felt they were lucky that they had ended it when they had.

Still, there was that awkwardness lingering around them now. She wanted to push through it. She had so much to tell him and she wanted to know what was going on with him from his own mouth.

“I'm really sorry for everything,” he blurted out suddenly in the middle of their stilted opening small-talk. Neither of them had ever been good at that sort of thing. “I- if I'd understood things better then I'd never- or I'd have done it differently- or-”

“Julian, there's nothing to forgive,” she said before he could talk himself into an anxiety attack. “I was angry. For awhile, but then I understood, I was so... _young._ And we were both lonely. But you look happier now. It's, uh, working for you and Garak I heard. And...”

"Kelas,” he said and bit his lip lightly. “Did Nerys tell you? I didn't want to... you know. Rub it in.”

“It's fine, I promise,” she said. “I want you to talk to me. Actually I... want to tell you something too.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I. I'm being joined.”

He frowned. “Wait, aren't you already-?”

“In the... 'marital' sense to use human terminology.”

“You're... you're getting _married?”_

“So to speak. Leeta and I are forming an official bond, which means establishing us as partners on Trill and Bajor. It's more ceremonial than anything, so that we can celebrate our union publicly, we already signed the various laws of partnership that could apply to us, but...” she shrugged. “It's important to her.”

Julian's face went through an entertainingly varied journey of confusion as she spoke. “Isn't she already mar- joined? To Rom? Did they break it off?”

“No, no. It's been a bit of a hassle with Ferengi laws, but Trill and Bajoran society have no issues with multiple partnerships, provided I don't carry any over into next lives and seeing as Rom _is_ the Grand Nagus and with the continuous feminist movement, it's worked out rather well. It's even being used to push further agendas on Ferenginar in favour of women legally being allowed multiple partners and not just the men. And seeing as Trill have quite lax attitudes to gender, well... all kinds of questions are being asked. It's really entertaining actually.”

“How long have you two...? _How?_ ”

“We just... I don't know, fell into it somehow. Rom had some trepidations at first, but actually he doesn't mind if she has a hundred other partners. As long as he knows she's loved.”

“I bet Quark's happy,” Julian laughed.

She bristled. “Yeah, well, Quark's just jealous he never nailed a Dax or became Grand Nagus, so I'd say he's got nothing to add to the conversation.”

“No, yes, of course, I didn't mean...” he stammered.

“I know." She began to laugh softly.

“What?”

“You're still Julian.”

“I... know,” he said despondently.

“I didn't mean it as an insult,” she said quickly. “I just missed you. That was all.”

He brightened considerably at that, eagerly responding when she drew him into a tight hug. “Are you happy?” he asked, arms feeling nicely protective around her, as they always had done.

“Yes,” she answered. “I understand... so much more about who I am. All of it. These last couple of years I've felt like being joined was the best thing to ever happen to me. I never used to think that, I just thought 'make it work, maybe even enjoy it if I could.' But now it's... it's _me._ You know?”

As she spoke they relinquished their embrace. He nodded. “You look content,” he said. Then he exhaled deeply.

“What is it?”

“I think every woman I kiss ends up in relationships with other women,” he said. “You, Nerys I'm guessing you know already, Sarina recently told me... Oh, _and_ I bumped into Melora... very happy for you all, but wondering if this warrants further analysis. I'm naturally attracted to people who love women _or_ I repel people away from me hard enough for them to never wish to be with another man, so to speak.”

Ezri began to laugh. “We'll call it the Bashir Phenomenon,” she said and the words caused her to dissolve into fits and howls.

“Please don't,” he groaned exaggeratedly, but after a moment her continued laughing set him off as well. From then on they devolved again every time someone shot them a disapproving look or one of them choked out 'The Bashir Phenomenon,' and only managed to rein it in after several minutes.

Still giggling on and off she managed to ask: “And what about you and Garak and... Kelas?”

“Kelas and Elim... I originally was just happy enough to be their friend. Figured I'd lost my chance, but... it all happened very naturally. If they _were_ to leave me for anyone of any or no gender I think I'd be very upset, but...” he shrugged, and Ezri could tell that even now he had his doubts about himself.

“They won't. Well, Garak definitely won't.”

“How do you know?”

“A hunch. And everyone from Deep Space Nine back in the day knows he was pining for you for _years_.”

“Seriously did _everyone_ know that except for me?”

“Pretty much,” she nodded. “Think where we all got it wrong was assuming you knew it too and just didn't reciprocate.” She shook her head at him fondly. “Oh, Julian,” and for a moment she looked and sounded exactly like Jadzia.

Julian wondered if he'd ever kissed Jadzia whether she would have ended up marrying Kira instead of Worf. But then, he'd recently learned that Kira apparently wasn't the marrying sort.

“I want you to bring them to the ceremony,” Ezri said.

“Really?”

She nodded. “I'd be thrilled to see you. And... if you'd come to my – what's the word humans use? - bachelor party? Nerys is planning it.”

“If it's nothing at all like Worf's I'm in,” he said.

Ezri raised her glass. “To the Bashir Phenomenon!”

“To the Bashir Phenomenon, I'm glad it was so useful to you.”

On cue, they both started laughing again.


	4. Kelas Parmak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julian explains his bold new theory to Kelas

Julian entered the house in his usual flurry of activity and excitement, as if he'd only been gone five minutes and not five months. Kelas looked up in surprise at first, but then relaxed. He'd clearly once again forgotten to tell him and Elim that he'd be home today, otherwise one or both of them would have been at the transporter to greet him.

Not that Julian seemed to mind that he'd had to take the very unreliable public transport all this way, immediately launching into various tales of everything that had happened since he'd last been on Cardassia - “the trials were a complete success, of course, I wasn't in any doubt – _well,_ there are always doubts, but it was amazing seeing the results, complete restoration! Nerys and Ezri send their love, Ezri's getting _joined,_ as in married, and she's invited the three of us to the ceremony, I've written the date somewhere-”

Kelas nodded, making a mental note to remind him once he had calmed down, crashed, and slept for several hours. He could predict it wouldn't be long. He was used to Julian like this, when he got caught up in the excitement and forgot to sleep or eat until his body decided enough was enough. It was always quite a joy to be on the receiving end of his energy, knowing that he and Elim were the cause of it to the extent that he'd even forgotten to tell them that he was coming back in favour of simply getting here as fast as possible (also forgetting the alternative would have been faster in the end).

He suddenly stopped speaking and looked around. “Oh, Elim's not here?”

Kelas shook his head and stood, taking his hands to ground him a little. “He'll be back late. You can tell us both in the morning, if you'd prefer?”

“I... hmmm, can I just – so Ezri and I were hypothesizing on what we've called the Bashir Phenomenon -” as he spoke, Kelas led him to the couch, - “it's not serious, I've just made a note of how many of my former partners are in relationships with genders of the non-male persuasion since having kissed me -”

“- but you're...” interjected Kelas, before faltering. Human notions of gender were confusing and manifold, but from what he understood Julian only tentatively grasped what might be called 'maleness' in his culture and then only because he considered it a social indicator of 'non-femaleness.' Or at least, that was the drift of how he'd explained it. Kelas had taken notes that he occasionally tried to make sense of. Cardassian gender really was much simpler to understand.

Julian waved his arms about as he spoke. “Yes, I know, I'm somewhere in the nebula of gender,” - ah yes, that was a popular modern term catching on everywhere. Kelas forgot sometimes that he and Elim had a few years on their passionate human partner and therefore didn't have as much of a grasp on new-linguistics - “but what I mean is – Sapphics. An old earth-term. Nerys' seeing cardassians, bajorans, humans, of a variety of genders – and I know you knew, don't pretend you didn't -, Ezri's getting joined to a lovely bajoran named Leeta, Melora has a girlfriend, and Sarina... is... busy,” he finished, and Kelas sensed he was keeping a secret, badly. Elim would get it out of him in seconds. “Thus, the Bashir Phenomenon, the realisation that for whatever reason there may be a correlation between my kissing and others' being driven towards 'non-me-ness,' for lack of a better word at current time.”

Kelas found himself smiling at that. Funny how Julian's fixation could be taken up with solving formulas and saving lives as well as something as strange as this Bashir Phenomenon. His brain really didn't have the luxury of picking and choosing what he focused on, leading to interesting results and conversations. Kelas could see from an evolutionary standpoint how it could be considered beneficial, if not always practical. He cleared his throat as if about to give a lecture: “I believe it may just be – what did you say? Sapphics. Lizards most certainly do enjoy being kissed by you. _And_ kissing you. And they don't intend to stop.” He sealed the words with proof of concept, lazily and with his smile melting into Julian's own.

“Perhaps,” said Julian afterwards, a little breathless and groggy as his energy dissipated rapidly in the aftermath, “I was taking it too seriously?”

“Not at all,” said Kelas, at last managing to get him to sit. “You posited a hypothesis and I presented some counter-evidence. All perfectly within the realms of good scientific practise.”

He was rewarded with a laugh for that, before Julian yawned widely and sat back against the headrest. “I'll wait up for Elim and tell you both the rest of it, if you can wait until then?”

“Mhmm,” said Kelas, covering him with a blanket and giving him another, softer kiss.

Julian was asleep some ten seconds later.


	5. Elim Garak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elim comes home to a nice surprise

Elim still approached home with caution as a rule, using his Bamarren training to the fullest in case anything was amiss. It wasn't entirely unfounded paranoia. He was occasionally sent death-threats, although these days he had a security team in charge of actually tracking down suspicious characters.

He was tired tonight, but immediately noticed the signs that something had changed from earlier, when he had left Kelas to his deserved day off from the institute. The lights were still on everywhere downstairs, even though Kelas would usually have retired to his small alcove in the bedroom by now. The path to the front door was disturbed, there were sounds from the kitchen – all of it didn't _have_ to mean anything, but it was different enough to the usual to set him on edge.

He took an alternate route, ending by the kitchen window, and glanced inside. Nothing seemed to be disturbed. No Kelas or anyone else though. Whatever had been going on in there was done with, no clues to indicate what it had been.

Around the side there were a pair of glass doors that led from the garden into the drawing room. When they had first considered it Elim had found the building to be a bit ostentatious, but Kelas had pointed out that Elim was a public figure and they were often three people living there, _and_ it came with a space for him to plant his flowers. Julian had agreed with gusto and Elim couldn't win under the sheer force of both of his doctors. And, he admitted to himself sometimes, having space was... nice.

It was also good for when he needed to sneak up on his own home because his paranoia was getting the better of him. There was someone lying on the couch – definitely not Kelas, but further inspection revealed the latter to be sitting comfortably in the corner, drinking what Elim presumed was a Tarkalean tea and reading his book. Which meant the person on the couch must be - in his excitement he lost his concentration and Kelas looked up and saw him. He would have been embarrassed except he was quite proud that he'd helped Kelas to hone the instincts to notice when he was being observed. That and his amused smile told Elim that he rather enjoyed his occasional hyper-vigilance. They'd all brought habits with them from the previous government and the war that might be considered strange without context, and a healthy suspicion wasn't the worst or most unhelpful of those.

Kelas opened the door for him, holding his index finger in front of Elim's mouth, before offering a kiss in lieu of his half-begun explanation of why he was out there. _It's fine, you don't need one,_ his eyes told him.

“Julian's come home early,” he said quietly.

“I saw,” said Elim. “He trod in one of my newer flowerbeds outside the door.”

“Ah,” Kelas understood. “Your first clue that not all was as it seemed, I take it.”

Elim nodded and glanced from Kelas to where Julian lay sprawled half-under a blanket. His limbs really seemed to outnumber the rest of bipedal species somehow. “When did he get here?”

“About five hours ago. He crashed not long after, as expected, but before that went on a rather interesting tangent that's clearly been his focus for a little while-” as he spoke he nodded to Elim to sit, which he did gratefully at the foot end of the couch. He gently rearranged the blanket so that it covered the gangly body a little better, not that it was possible to fully contain Julian beneath it with one leg hanging off the side and an arm halfway up the headrest. He nodded to Kelas to continue.

“- I think it's his insecurities taking on the form of parody, if I had to diagnose it just a little. He's concerned that he's going to drive us away.”

“Really? How come?”

“No real reason. He dressed it up under past experiences with female lovers, called it... ah yes, the Bashir Phenomenon. He wasn't really taking it seriously, but I believe his concern towards us may have been genuine. You can decide in the morning when he wakes up, he'll probably tell you about everyone's he's kissed who's now a... _Sapphic_ I believe he called it? I didn't quite understand, I think they're a human concept.”

Elim smiled, a little sardonic, a little fond. “Perhaps related to Sappho? She's a poet he's had me read, barely anything left, but the empty spaces where there used to be words are... intriguing. And what did you tell him?”

“I said that there was no reason to worry about lizards, they quite enjoy the kissing.”

“Lizards? You called us lizards? How rude,” said Elim drily. He stood and leaned forward, grazing Julian's forehead with his lips. “Not untrue on the kissing though,” he said softly, as the sleepy frown on Julian's face softened ever so slightly.

\----- The End ------

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started to wonder what it'd look like if there was a dinner party with Elim, Kelas, and Julian on one side and Nerys, Laren, Natima (whom I ship with Nerys based on NOTHING at all), + my two OCs from "the language of change" (also Cardassian) Zuret and Iloran... maybe add Keiko and Miles to that. What a polycule! 
> 
> (Miles wouldn't know where to sit, Natima accidentally accuses Elim of warcrimes after the first five minutes, Kelas and Laren get on surprisingly well much to everyone's worry, and Julian talks excitedly with Iloran, while Zuret gets steadily more drunk. At some point Elim and Keiko just go into the garden and talk flowers, everone else ends up playing the Cardassian version of twister, Laren and Zuret have very intense competitive tension, Natima and Kelas drunkenly lecture politics. Miles dislocates his arm. He wasn't actually playing, it just happened. 
> 
> Julian has the best evening ever)


End file.
